Hey Jan,
Most pizza makers treat salt as a flavor thing. Add more, and your dough tastes better - add less, and it tastes bland.
And that's definitely part of it. But salt is actually doing something a lot more interesting to your dough - and once you understand it, you'll look at your recipes completely differently.
Here's the short version: salt tightens gluten. The more salt you use, the firmer and more structured your dough becomes. Which also means it rises less.
But here's what I didn't expect:
Using less salt results in a softer, more open crumb. In other words, bigger air bubbles.
During fermentation, your dough is producing all kinds of aromatic compounds that give great pizza (and bread) its depth and complexity. And a more open, airy crumb holds onto those compounds better than a dense, tight one. So in a weird way, using less salt can actually give you a more flavorful dough.
I actually stumbled onto this when I was going deep on Philly cheesesteaks - not pizza. I was messing around with different sandwich roll recipes and noticed that the ones with less salt kept producing softer, lighter rolls. That texture translated directly to better flavor. Once I connected those dots, I brought the same thinking back to my pizza dough.
What I landed on: I use just enough salt that the dough doesn't taste bland on its own - usually somewhere between 2 and 2.5%.
In addition to creating a better dough, this lower salt level means I can season my sauce and toppings more aggressively without the overall pizza tasting too salty. The whole pizza comes together as a balanced, properly seasoned bite - without any one component doing all the heavy lifting.
So, if you've been using 3% or higher because you saw it in a recipe somewhere, it's worth experimenting with pulling that back. Make the same dough you always make, drop the salt to 2.2%, and give it a taste. I think you'll be surprised!
Charlie
P.S. If you want to dive deeper into this topic, and much, much more - I just re-opened enrollment to Total Pizza Mastery. It's a 5-week digital course including weekly lessons, live Sunday Q&As, and a Discord community to ask questions and get feedback in real time. It starts on February 16th - only 11 spots remain.
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